The Book of Living and Dying (19 page)

W
“we met at a party,” Michael said. He took a sip of his drink, stared at the ice.

Sarah clung to the edge of the bed, the codeine-and-alcohol cocktail washing over her. “What party? When?”

“Some out-of-town thing a while ago—a hemlock party. I got roped into going.”

She shot him a look of disgust. “A hemlock party? That’s not even funny, Michael. What was Donna doing there?”

He swirled the ice in his glass, took another sip. “I don’t want to sound like a jerk or anything, Sarah, but she was all over me, you know? I wasn’t really attracted to her.”

“Why wouldn’t Donna tell me about this?” Sarah said, more to herself than to him. The whole thing just didn’t make sense. If only she could stop the room from spinning she might be able to figure it out.

“Maybe she was embarrassed about it once she sobered up,” Michael said.

Sobered up? Sarah fixed him with a clinical gaze. “Did you make out?”

“Come on, Sarah.”

“Did you make out?”

“I don’t know!” He threw his drink back, unscrewed the lid on the brandy and filled his glass again.

“So, you’re telling me you don’t remember.”

“No, I don’t. I don’t remember anything from that night.”

“Don’t remember anything …? I find that hard to believe.”

“I swear to you, Sarah. It’s one big blur. I didn’t even know she had that photograph. It’s pretty weird, don’t you think, someone carrying a piece of you around like that.”

Sarah brought her glass unsteadily to her lips. “Kind of like finding a pirate video of yourself doing something you never did?”

“Yes—no—come on, Sarah, what can I say? There’s nothing between us. The whole thing is just a coincidence. How can I make you believe that?”

“I’d just like to know why Donna thinks you’re such a creep.”

Michael contemplated his drink as though he expected to find an answer there. “At the risk of sounding egotistical,” he finally said, “she wouldn’t be the first girl to get pissed off for being ignored.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, women have a tendency to get vindictive when they don’t get what they want.”

“And men,” Sarah added softly, thinking of Peter. The brandy burned on the way down as she took another gulp from her glass. Michael’s face moved in and out of focus. Yet even as she struggled to keep his features in place, she had to admit that she felt better just being with him, despite everything. She raised her glass in a sardonic toast, slurring the words. “To life—whatever it may be.”

Tapping her glass lightly with his, Michael leaned forward
and spoke in a voice like Humphrey Bogart’s. “Life ain’t fair, sweetheart. That’s all there is to it. So we drink our sorrows away and kick the guy next to us because it makes us feel better to know that someone hurts more than we do.” He drained his glass, poured another.

“That’s why there’s the Island of Misfit Toys,” Sarah said, placing her hand on his arm, “… so the misfits can stick together when the world rains down on their heads.”

They roared with drunken laughter until Sarah sloshed her drink down onto the desk and gripped her head in her hands. “God, I feel so sick.” She teetered on the edge of the bed, peering up at him through one eye. “What kind of a name is Mort?”

“It’s pronounced
More,”
he said, correcting her. “It’s French. It was my mother’s maiden name. I assumed it to honour my heritage.”

Sarah furrowed her brow as if pondering an impossible question. “I thought your mom was native.”

“She was. A lot of natives mingled with the French, if you know what I mean.”

“So what’s your ‘father’ called?” She mimed quotation marks with her fingers.

“Field.”

“Field … Field …” Sarah rolled the name over her tongue.
Dr. Field.
The meaning of it kicked her square in the teeth. He was one of John’s attending physicians. The patient who asked for an assisted suicide; the doctor who refused. So she and Michael were inextricably linked through a question and the answer of a gun. It was too remarkable a connection for mere coincidence and yet she couldn’t bring herself to tell him. It was just too tragic, too sad for words. Sarah reached into her knapsack and tugged her journal out. “I want you to
look at something.” Leafing to the tarot entries, she handed the journal to Michael, pointing emphatically at the drawings of the cards. “What does it mean?”

Michael took the book, glanced at the illustrations. “These are good.”

“Read that line,” Sarah said, stabbing at the page. “Something in French. I have no idea what it means.”

Michael handed the journal back to her. “The cards are just symbols, Sarah. They aren’t meant to be taken literally. They’re tools … to help people access the subconscious.”

“She spoke French to me,” Sarah persisted, pushing the book back at him. “Something about a message.”

Michael took the journal and stared at the page. “It’s not about a message … it’s something else.” He stood up, staggered across the room and pulled a thick paperback from the bookshelf—
Harrap’s French/English Dictionary—then
sat down heavily on the bed, searching through the book.
“‘Mensonge,’”
he said. “Is that the word she used?

“Yeah, that’s it!”

“It means ‘lie,‘” Michael explained. “She must have been quoting Jean Cocteau. He was a French poet—and a notorious opium addict I might add.
‘Je suis un mensonge qui dit toujours la vérité.’
I am a lie that always speaks the truth.”

“A lie that always speaks the truth …” Sarah whispered the words. It was Michael the old woman was referring to. It had to be.
Trust him.
“She told me I was looking for the girl. Why would she say that?”

Michael tossed the journal onto the bed. “Why do you think she would say that?”

Sarah’s mind drew a blank. “Maybe she meant the girl from the photos … I don’t know.”

Michael massaged his eyes with one hand, saying nothing.
Sarah felt suddenly embarrassed. She had let herself get carried away. She had made too much of it.
He’ll think I’m crazy,
she thought, the codeine and alcohol opening the door to self-doubt. “I thought you were going to show me the video,” she said, in an attempt to right the situation.

Michael sat down in his chair. Taking a small stool from the side of the desk, he motioned for Sarah to sit beside him. “You’re going to like this. But first, I want to do something.” Holding the offending snapshot between two fingers, he lit it with the disposable lighter, turning it so the flames swallowed the photo completely, before dropping it into the ashtray next to his bed. The edges curled and crinkled in on themselves, the flames flaring up in a prism of chemical colour, then vanishing. He turned to her, and in a show of fidelity, kissed her tenderly.

“Now,” he said, clicking the mouse and opening a window so that John appeared on the screen, “Utopian Planet” grinding out over the speakers. His image flickered, moving around the imaginary landscape, sometimes wearing sunglasses, sometimes not. Birds flew from the guitar, grass and trees sprang up, flowers bloomed, the sky swirled with brightly coloured clouds, gathering, contracting.

“It’s beautiful …” Sarah said, her lips still tingling from his kiss. “Is this the secret project you were working on?”

He shook his head. “No. I’m not finished with that yet. But soon.”

She knew better than to press him. He wouldn’t reveal his secret until he was ready. But watching John on the screen, she was immediately overcome by how much she loved him. Reaching for her glass, she promised herself that she would hold on to that feeling, that he would always be her brother, no matter what. Ghosts and all.

She couldn’t find her house keys. Searching frantically, she found the keys eventually in the jumble of junk at the bottom of her purse. But the lock refused to cooperate. “Open!” she growled, rattling the key until the mechanism finally gave way and the door swung wide. Stepping quickly inside, Sarah raised her eyes just in time to see John float into her bedroom. She dashed back out, pulling the door shut behind her. Gasping outside the house, one hand still on the door handle, she thought to run back to Michael’s, to sneak through his bedroom window and hide out there for the night. But then indignation reared up, and instead of running away, she barged into the house with a shout, only to find her mother waiting on the other side.

“What do you think you’re doing?” her mother demanded.

Sarah ignored her blistering stare, busying herself with her shoelaces, putting her slippers carefully on her feet, adjusting her coat on the hook—anything to avoid acknowledging her mother. When her mother left her alone at last, Sarah crept up to her own bedroom and peeked in. It was empty. At least, from where she was standing it looked empty. She made her way into the kitchen, filled a tumbler with water from the tap and brought it into her room, dipping her fingers into the water and flicking them in mock exorcism. “Stay out,” she commanded. After, she hunted around for a magazine because she knew that fear would prevent sleep from coming—even with the lights on.

The fist of nausea gripped her stomach. Sarah staggered out of bed and ran to the bathroom. Her body heaved repeatedly as the waves rode one on top of the other, her hands clenching the sides of the cold porcelain bowl. Outside the bathroom, her mother shambled haltingly through the kitchen, pausing to listen at the door. Sarah tried to retch quietly so that her mother wouldn’t pry and jump to some stupid conclusion, like that she was pregnant. Ever since Sarah’s first period her mother had worried endlessly that she would get in trouble. Sarah simply refused to entertain the notion, even though she knew it was a distinct possibility. She was weeks late. She wouldn’t think about it, though. She just wanted to be sick in peace. But even as she hung her head over the bowl, hands trembling, dry heaves wrenching her body, she knew that illness of any kind was not a private affair. Illness was a spectator sport, it seemed.

It made it difficult to maintain even the smallest degree of modesty. Closed doors were strictly forbidden to allow free access for hospital personnel, who would burst in a thousand times a day asking about this and that, taking blood pressure, taking blood. And there was no such thing as a good night’s rest, either, not with the living dead wandering the halls at all hours, or nurses crashing in to perform their rounds. Not a night went by that someone didn’t have a major malfunction, like trying to climb into bed with one of the other patients or screaming at the top of their lungs because they believed that someone had taken up residence in their room, when they weren’t in their own room in the first place. But the worst nights were the ones when death arrived, the dull bell sounding at the nurses’ station, the quick squeak of white sneakers on the green linoleum floor.
The sudden appearance of relatives, clamouring down the hall, their cries of horror and grief. And then the stretcher, rolling soberly past the open doors of the other residents, sheet draped carefully over the dearly departed.

When the worst of it was over, Sarah wiped the saliva from her mouth with a damp facecloth. Taking several codeine pills from the bottle, she didn’t worry any more that her mother would discover them missing. As she closed the medicine cabinet, though, her heart gave a momentary skip of fear at the thought of John’s face reflected there. She surveyed her own face in the mirror: a weary, wooden mask. Her lips were chapped and cracked, like an old woman’s.
It’s his fault,
she thought as she picked up the hairbrush and began slowly brushing her hair. It came out in small clumps that dropped from her fingers into the wastebasket like little birds’ nests, empty and forgotten. She continued to brush, until the pills started to take effect, anaesthetizing her brain and easing the fluid back into her joints. She would go to the cemetery, she casually decided. She would bring flowers.

The cemetery was deserted. Sarah drifted along the path, a bright bouquet of orange chrysanthemums clenched in her hand. They were such happy flowers. At the hospital she had kept some by the bed always. She hunched her shoulders against the cold, dried leaves the colour of tobacco rolling like small tumbleweeds past her feet. The sky hung grey and heavy in the frosty air, the promise of snow lining the clouds
gathering on the horizon. Along the path, trees leaned over, fingers woven in a tangled canopy above her head. The wind gusted in quick bursts. Sarah turned the collar up on her coat, fastening the button. She yanked a blue wool scarf from her pocket and shook it out, wrapping it around her neck and up over her chin, tucking the ends in at the throat.

The path twisted and turned through the graveyard. From time to time Sarah would stop to read an inscription. “One under heaven.” She liked that one especially. She would insist on having that on her own headstone some day. With that thought, she wished that Michael were with her, sharing the tranquility of the cemetery. Standing among the tombstones, she felt the urge to kiss him, because he would understand her desire to be there and because she loved him. It amazed her how strong this feeling was and that it miraculously extended to the rest of the world as well—including her mother. This fascinated her, given the fact that she hadn’t felt anything short of disdain for the woman for so long. All at once Sarah realized that she could never survive without Michael, that her life and his life were now forever entwined. The thought of him with another girl, she couldn’t bear it—especially if that girl was Donna. She wondered again about his videos. She’d never considered checking to see if Donna was in any of them. The next chance she got, she would do that, though the idea filled her with humiliation. Her insecurity. Her lack of faith. But she couldn’t be rational when it came to him. She’d lost too much already. There was no way around it. She would have to know for sure.

As Sarah turned back to the path, she was taken by the figure of an old man sitting on a bench in the distance. He sat staring straight ahead, a fedora over his silver hair so that

he looked—profiled sharply against the grey sky—like a Victorian paper silhouette. Curiosity got the better of her and she stopped to watch him, the chrysanthemums held in front of her like a nosegay, when all at once the old man turned and looked at her. Sarah cried out, hiding quickly behind a large tree at the side of the path. The man was the spitting image of Mr. Ellis, the old man from Room 317. But it couldn’t be him, she told herself. Mr. Ellis was dead. She’d seen it with her own eyes. Her breathing shallow and erratic, she covered her mouth with her hand. It couldn’t be Mr. Ellis, she told herself again. It was just an old man enjoying the solitude of the cemetery, perhaps musing on his life or the life of his loved ones buried there. But this tenuous rationale was quickly unmoored by the tide of delirium rising inside her, until she finally burst out from behind the tree, the chrysanthemums tumbling in an orange riot to the ground and trampled beneath her feet as she ran toward the street. She didn’t dare look back to see if the man was still on the bench. It must have been the light, she convinced herself as she hurried along the sidewalk. The light, playing tricks with her eyes. She pulled the scarf tighter around her neck and quickened her pace toward home.